pain

My youngest daughter recently started running cross-country. A cross over from soccer as she loved her coach and he coaches girls soccer in the spring, and cross-country in the fall. She’s been doing an amazing job, until the one race she was in agonizing pain. I knew that she was running last after being at a meet all morning, but what did I miss?

It suddenly hit me that no one, herself included, remembered to remind the kids to stay hydrated for the last race. Then, volunteering to march alongside the band for the oldest daughter in a recent parade, a mom told me of a boy cramping and almost passing out during the last parade. You guys. What do I always say (to my kids to be embarrassing)? Hydrate with some high quality H2O!! Yes. I use The Waterboy.

So now that we have covered this, grab some water right now and read the rest of this.

5 Signs That Your Body Needs More Water:

You actually feel dry. Dry mouth, dry eyeballs, or dry skin. Right. Like you’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name…or something like that. Sugary drinks are like adding some crack to your brain and are not going to hydrate. I do not make these facts up. I just write them in a more interesting way than others. If you are experiencing itchy eyes and don’t normally have allergies, go for some water.

You feel like you are 80 years old at age 30. I might be the exception to this because I started to feel old at 23, but really, if you are experiencing joint pain, I learned about this really cool thing called synovial fluid, and hey. It needs some love. Sugary stuff is inflammatory to joints. Chances are you have heard this. Water is not. It helps nutrients move through your blood therefore getting to your joints, and not only that, your body’s cartilage is composed of nearly 80% water. Hmm. What if it’s not getting any? Where is it taking nutrients from? Think about it.

Fatigue like you can’t explain to the average person. When I was in chronic fatigue, my body had to work twice as hard. I don’t try to think back on those days of 24/7 pain for like 5 years, but I do know that I wasn’t doing the correct things. No doctor ever addressed this. Seriously. Water brings oxygen into your body. No one, not one doctor, said you know, mild dehydration causes the blood to thicken. I started noticing when I went for phlebotomies that my blood was really thick at certain times (not trying to gross you out, but it was part of my life for over 19 years to watch my blood go into a bag, and technically, I still have to keep an eye on it). I was always so out of it before, and during the nurses would say drink, drink, drink. One smart nurse finally hooked me up to an IV. Duh. That felt better. I didn’t know that my body was sucking the oxygen out from wherever it could find it, thus creating this sort of mini-storm of fatigue, mood swings, and basically quicksand feeling.

You might suffer digestive problems. Let’s talk about our colons. They need some acknowledgement for all the shit they put up with. << I couldn’t resist, but really. I would be embarrassed about this, but that ship sailed years ago when my friend was diagnosed with colon cancer and had zero history and the only warning was she thought it might have been hemorrhoids. I know I sound like my college biology teacher, and I can still hear her today, but she would yell to the class your ermmm feces says lots about your health. Again, if this saves a life, I don’t mind saying stay hydrated and take note of any issues and see a doctor as needed. Don’t be embarrassed about this as life is too short.

Your headaches are increasing. A very noticeable sign all the way down to your young child who is in sports. A theory is that the dehydration feeling causes pressure in your brain to change. Drink 2-3 cups of water immediately as that helps (in theory) to level out the fluid levels around your spinal cord. I believe this to be true as I get enormous pressure and, I notice when I urinate that it is not the right color. Ack!! Those two go hand in hand. Dark pee, headaches, drink more water. Sorry not sorry. Trying to be helpful and embarrassing at the same time.

The bottom line is, why don’t we talk about this with our health professionals? Are we too embarrassed to mention these signs? Our body is showing us in the only way it can that it is of dire importance that we notice the signs and signals it is giving us. Liked this? Here are 5 Steps to Being Healthier Today to continue on in this theme. Just use the search button on the right hand side or the top tab “health” for more. Want my newsletter? That’s over there too.

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Happy International Day of Yoga my friends. After one full year of teaching yoga, wow, I can honestly say that my body image has changed, but I still work on it daily! In 2010, you are welcome to use the side search on the blog and read all about that year, but that was the year that everything started to attack me. Autoimmune changed my life…and I don’t know if I will ever really accept it, but I have learned how to control it and that was a huge relief.

That being said, several changes happened to my body during the last 5 years that were not there before. I found out I had fibrocystic breasts, and while it’s never a fun topic, I am linking it to my blog post on what happened that year and how I found out. So I am going to be honest, my body image was not good around the time I came back to yoga due to pain, years of invisible diseases playing a game with me, plus more. In some of my previous posts, I honestly thought I was writing in a positive way as I always laughed at myself; however, going back and reading now, I see that I was not fooling anyone.

I was in severe pain for so long that it was a deep path I had carved into my brain. It was well-worn, so naturally I didn’t notice when my self-esteem went down the same path. Why is it that your friends don’t say the things you need to hear? Don’t be that friend who just lets your friend continue down this path. Set the path on fire so they have to find a new way.

My new path was yoga. Yoga became my saving grace. When my anxiety from the countless doctor’s appointments was high as I waited on new tests, I would go to yoga. At first, I cared what people thought of me in my yoga clothes. I was not able to do all the things other people could…but I went to restorative yoga anyway.

What did I learn from this class? I will tell you lessons that I learned which can’t be taught from a mirror.

3 Reasons to Ignore the Mirror:

The mirror doesn’t tell you how beautiful you are to other people. This is serious. It reflects back your insecurities. When you look in the mirror, you might see tired eyes, lines, and saggy skin. When your friend sees you do a pose in yoga class for the first time that you have working on for a few months, they see your natural inner beauty. I am telling you I know this to be true. I have witnessed it in my friends who were afraid to come to yoga. You might not even see how you glow, but I do. As your teacher, I send you so much love and light during class. Never once thinking of what you can’t do at all. I have been there my friend.

The mirror is actually supposed to be a tool. Yup. Just a thing to use for alignment in postures. It is not there to judge us as that’s our job. Do you ever stop in mid-thought and think to yourself “What if my daughter, sister, friend does this to herself?” Would you allow others to speak so badly about themselves as you do in your head? No matter the woman, no matter how you talk to yourself in your head, the answer is always I would never want anyone else to talk to themselves like this. Seriously. Ask a friend. My group of sisters, not related, but from all cultures, meet regularly and we have said this many times.

The mirror reflects the light around us, but not inside us. Remember that the next time you are not going to yoga class because of how you “look” in the mirror or in yoga clothes or in blah, blah or until you lose x number of pounds. Seriously remember this. Because through yoga, I have learned to steady my mind, open my heart and come back to the breath. If I miss yoga for too long, or don’t go for myself as I am the teacher, ha, if I don’t have that time to do the inner reflection, yes, hell yes, the outer reflection can look ugly to me. I absorb others energy at times and if I don’t get it out through the experience of yoking myself back to the present moment, this breath, this body as Rolf Gates would say, “The real payoff of a yoga practice, I came to see, is not a perfect handstand or a deeper forward bend—it is the newly born self that each day steps off the yoga mat and back into life.”

Each time I leave practice I am whole again my friends. I have then collected all the pieces of my soul that seemed scattered and I feel new again. Come to yoga my friends. The mirror can’t possibly tell you how it feels.

Want to learn new yoga poses in 3 different ways? A break-down of poses for your body? Check out the Head|Heart|Health Club.

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Increasing gratitude doesn’t seem like such a hard task, does it? Well for many people who live in pain daily, it is. But what if, just for the next 4 weeks, you focused on other tasks instead of your pain. Maybe you thought about ways to increase your fitness for a week, or to eat beautiful and nutritious food the next week, or ways to help create balance in your life and help deal with your stress, and lastly you increased your self-care. These are actually the steps I started taking when I took back my life from pain.

I began looking deeply inside my soul for true and honest answers to questions that needed to be asked. I developed a series of workbooks on these tasks and questions to help others, but you can read more about that under my Head|Heart|Health tab. I am here to offer you some free resources on ways you can increase gratitude in your life right now, no matter what is going on. Remember who you are talking to here?? trust me when I say I really and truly understand that the first step is often the hardest one to take.

Let’s deconstruct this for a moment. Gratitude is feeling thankful and appreciative for people, things, and sometimes everything in between. That warm feeling you get when you drive up to the coffee window and someone has just paid for yours, or the random man in the grocery store, for whatever reason, hands your family a $50 bill, and says it’s on him. <<< this happened. So if other people are creating experiences for other people like this, no matter what is going on in the NEWS my friends, let’s not promote what we hate. Let’s work to increase feelings of gratitude in ourselves and therefore in others we encounter through our positive actions.

5 Ways to Increase Gratitude:

Say thank you as your feet hit the floor. Are you in pain? No offense, I totally feel you, but for just a second, shift your thoughts right now as you get out of bed. Whatever your dominant foot is, as you swing it over the bed, the second it touches the floor, say thank you. Say thank you all the way to the bathroom, because that’s where you probably go first. Focus inward as you really let the words thank you settle into your entire being. This gets you ready for the next tip.

Using a dry-erase marker, write your positive affirmations on the mirra, that’s southern for mirror, and immediately look at them as you are waking up. I don’t know what others need to hear, but coming from 3 years of re-setting my mind to focus on others things instead of pain, I can tell you what I used. I am healthy (I wasn’t), I am whole, (I didn’t think so), and I am healing (I was, but couldn’t see it yet). So I would think to myself I am healthy and envision a healthy me for just a moment and be grateful for that health. I would picture myself whole, which to me at the time was without pain, anger, and depression. Lastly, I would see myself as healed. Someone my girls could look up to again. Not the pajama-clad fibromyalgia, Hashimoto’s, well you get the picture, mom I had become. Again, it was all about changing my perspective.

Journal it down. My writings at first were not really full of gratitude. They actually seemed full of other feelings that I was trying to get away from. So instead of that, I cut myself loose from anyone and anything that created the opposite of what I was really and truly trying to create for myself in my life. I started un-becoming everything I was not. I created a pattern of healing for myself by first going to the worst parts. I deconstructed my fear. Then I didn’t look back. I wrote what I was happy about each day until gradually, I didn’t think about what went wrong as much.

Yoga or meditation. Yes, eventually, after all the pain, I became a yoga teacher. But I started out slowly. We all have to start somewhere, remember? Here is a post about what I did to start my journey, so you can read a bit more on restorative yoga. This allowed me to still the patterns of my mind and practice an age-old flowing meditation. Please don’t mistake yoga for something it is not. It is not a religion. It is quite simply a method for dealing with the suffering of life. As I started meditation, one yogi told me it can be your time to get closer to God or whatever you believe by listening to your inner wisdom that actually can be God trying to talk to you. It is simply a way to practice mindfulness and inner stillness in this very face paced world.

Practice pausing in your day. This one is very important because so often, we react first. What if what the other person said to you actually wasn’t about you at all? Yes, it feels that way all the time. I am a Scorpio who is quick to anger…need I say more? What if, for just a moment, the hurtful feelings we got from the e-mail, message or phone call, was paused. Like on TV. Okay, now we have a moment to look at it. You know what, Bob looked stressed out today didn’t he? I wonder if he has too much on his plate and someone already chewed him out, so when he sent this, he in turn, did the same to me because that was the energy he was feeling? I don’t have to continue the pattern. This isn’t even about me at all. Maybe I will go around the corner and say hey, Bob, what can I do to help you? Bob will certainly be surprised. He may even start to feel grateful, as well as sorry, but that’s his stuff, so I am going to promote what I love instead of bashing him right back.

Research has shown through decades of studies, that practicing gratitude can, in fact, have powerful and lasting effects on physical well-being, social relationships, and most importantly self-worth. So often we get caught in a cycle that needs to be broken, and guess what happens when we take back control? Research again reports that we develop stronger immune systems, better sleep, and less pain and aches. Well I’ll be…an example of this. From not moving to yoga teacher…I hope you start some of these practices today! Need even more help? Try this E-book here.

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Hi friends…today I had a follow-up radio interview to my previous interview that talked about Living with invisible diseases. Today the talk focused on how I was able to move forward from all that pain, and start getting back to the life I thought I was going to be living.

What is Blog Talk Radio anyway?

BlogTalkRadio is the online radio network that allows users to host live call-in talk shows with unlimited participants using our free podcast recording tool. No software to download or complicated audio equipment.

I would love for you to listen to this quick show! The Magic Happens “Share the Wealth” with Kellie Fitzgerald as hostess. The interview went so well again that Kellie has asked me to come back for an even longer talk next time because we both feel that living with invisible diseases does NOT need to be hidden in some dark, dusty corners and spoken of in whispers. No. We both understand the pain of inflammatory diseases and what that brings to the table when people think “You look well.” To be honest with you, I don’t remember what I said last time…but it was painful I know. Raw. Real. And me. Here it is: Older Blog Talk Radio Interview <<< so you can see the difference. If that one doesn’t work, I was also interviewed here. << By host Tonya Wilson.

Thank you for always being here with me! Namaste my friends.

Here is the link to 4 Weeks to Wellness. I appreciate those of you who have already signed up and are giving me such great feedback after listening to me this morning! You can leave a comment on this post if you would like! Also see the work with me tab at the top of the blog for more!

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Finding Success Took Me Years…Now You Can Benefit.

Two years ago, I was severely depressed from my illnesses. I was in pain daily, overweight, and couldn’t find a doctor to help me…other than suggest prescriptions for life to manage my pain. I knew that I didn’t want to do that, and February of 2014 was when I left the doctor’s office more depressed than ever as I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia…and no treatment. None, but medicine. Nothing to address my diet, my life, how I was going to live since I said no to this medicine that could cause more damage to my liver.

But after the sadness passed, I was determined to continue my research into helping myself, and others like me.

I discovered my mind played a key role in all areas of head, heart and health and I learned the secret of using my mind to become a success in every area of my life. Not just mentally, but physically and emotionally as well. It sounds so simple…but it took me almost 17 years to “wake up” and discover that the true hero of my life had to be me. The key to making this happen was getting mad, and forming a plan.

I lost over 25 pounds on my 5’2 inch frame, started moving more…and finally started feeling better. I had truly lost hope of ever feeling better before I mapped out the series of steps that was crucial in changing my life…and never would have imagined that I would make it through 200 hours of Vinyasa Yoga Teacher Training in 2015!!

I no longer let my thoughts of pain, depression, and hopelessness rule my life. I took control back over my head, my heart and my health.

If you have tried everything, or at least you think you have, if you feel like you need a fresh outlook on your life, I am offering lifestyle tools for the first time online! <<< Clicking that link takes you to my new product portal. I have coached hundreds of people over the last year in my business, but decided to open it up to an online community. Work with me to help change your life!

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There comes a time in every yoga teacher’s journey when the teachings of Patanjali and the Buddha are read and discussed at length with other like minds. As I read the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, several things crossed my mind. One, this guy is confusing. Two, I am reading the same thing over and over again. Three, I see the word suffering more often than I should. Hmm. I wondered if it was trying to tell me something.

To understand that suffering is optional, first you have to look at what suffering really is. Suffering is “the state of undergoing pain, distress or hardship.” and it varies from person to person. There is no hierarchy of suffering people. No one person’s suffering or difficulty is any less legitimate than another persons or any less deserving of empathy.

None of us can change our past difficulties, loss, heartbreak or sickness, but with effort, you can change your reactions and your responses when life takes a detour. Your brain goes to why me? Blame. Regret. Anger. The finger pointing…has that helped your suffering? No. These responses add to it. Suffering is actually universal. It is not unique to you.

Here is an example…my friend has a hard life. She didn’t ask for it…but neither did any of our friends who are living with the cards that were dealt to them. She is smiling, moving forward and preparing to meet yet another cancer battle all while moving, raising 3 little girls and being a mom. I am sure the initial “why me” kicked in, but she didn’t stay there in that place as it is not going to help her. She moved into “kicking cancer’s ass again” momentum.

Suffering is universal, but each experience is unique to that person and it is not a contest. Why would you need to compare yourself and bring out unnecessary suffering by thinking that you have it harder than everyone else on this planet? What if you use your suffering as an opportunity for growth? I know that sounds cliché, but if you know anything at all about me, you know that I would not write about something unless I have been through it or believed it could be done.

While pain might be inevitable, the suffering that comes from the pain is not. Suffering is not a state of life, it is a state of mind. Suffering is your response to an event. Whether you suffer or not depends entirely on your reaction to that situation. ~Paramahamsa Nithyananda (Swamiji)

Things I have learned about suffering:

Move through your pain. The first step might be grief. You are likely not going to be in the same place as you were before. If you ignore your grief, (1) Denial 2) Anger 3) Bargaining 4) Depression 5) Acceptance) you will likely find yourself caught in one of the stages of grief and not able to move forward. I was stuck at depression…and there is no shame in that, but you must get to number 5 to be able to release it.

Healing through closure. If this is by talking to others who you feel have caused you pain, here is where you do it. If it is beyond that, then you must learn forgiveness of the situation…notice I didn’t say you had to forgive them although that would be nice too. If you were born into a situation that was never of your making, it is time to relinquish the past. The past is not real, as it is now only a vivid recollection of how things were. And even then we might have added in extra details. You have to let it go and surrender to the present moment in order to move forward.

Progress comes in the end when you decide you are ready to move forward from this place. You must make a conscious decision to move forward and only you can do that. If you stay in the place of pain and bitterness then they won. Your pain won, your hate won, etc. You must constantly make that conscious decision to yoke yourself to the present moment. I do it through yoga and meditation. I already lost enough time to this thing called suffering. It doesn’t deserve to have more.

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So dear friends, tomorrow is May 12th. It is National Fibromyalgia and Chronic Pain day. My personal efforts to make this dis-ease known have grown to over 25,500 fans on my FB fan page for my blog. Although I must confess…most follow because of my quotes, and that’s okay too. So tonight, I’d like to talk to you a little bit about faith.

When you start out feeling human and “whole”, you might not realize what a great thing it is to be seen as you. You are simply Joe, or Josefina, or Steve. At some point though, if you develop health problems, you seems to identify yourself with them. You are no longer Aimee. You are Aimee, the writer, living with invisible diseases and pain. This can be both a blessing and a curse…because like the great C.S. Lewis said “Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”

So you find out you are not alone with that thing you have that no one can pronounce. However, you start to cling to it. All of its symptoms, its pain, and it’s mess become you. Until one day, you can take it no more, and you claw your way up out of the misery and stop checking the “support” group that really provides no support. No, it doesn’t. It provides a place to vent. But if we were to be honest with ourselves, and we need to be, it doesn’t build your faith muscles. It lets you say things like “I’m sick…I am so exhausted today.” And people tell you to rest because they mean well. They really do. But the truth is, we are all exhausted in these groups. We are all in pain. Some of us are working towards finding a better way to live.

So I would like you to get a journal. It can be any journal you want. This one happens to be on sale that I linked. And I like the quote. I have heard it’s pretty popular. Anyway, start out with the date. That’s easy enough. Then I’d like you to write ONE, only one good thing that happened that day. It can be that you got out of bed. Then close the journal. Then the next day do the same thing. Work up to actually journaling about the good in your life. No matter what happens that day, find at least one good thing on which to build your faith muscles. You can do this.

So in honor of National Fibromyalgia Day, get your journal ready. Your journal of faith. Your journal of hope. Check back here because I am going to have more ideas for you soon. Don’t forget, I’m here for you. I know you can do this!

In yoga, when we have discussed “right action”, it allows us to make the right choice for now. In that moment. I am quite literally doing what feels agreeable to myself in that moment. Whether it is to hold a pose longer, to try the harder variations when the teacher says to move on, or to listen to my body if I feel I am not quite ready to move forward.

The other night, I was reminded of how far I have progressed in 5 months. During class, I didn’t take a certain pose to the last possible variation. I was afraid to try it because I wasn’t quite sure of the placement of my arms and shoulders…and how people were moving forward. There are times people appear to flow effortlessly into the final pose. You know how the teacher says “You are in the pose now, but if you want to move forward…”, well I do want to move forward. So, after class I asked how the pose looks as you are moving into it. Two of my friends were there and are able to move on so they showed me this pose Bird of Paradise. I was quite surprised when one said to take the washcloth, and try it, and I actually got my shoulders right.

Well, let me remind you if you are new, way back in the past blog archives here, you will read about months I couldn’t move my shoulder and how manipulating my shoulder-blade at all was almost impossible. So when I am in yoga, I don’t exactly always allow my right action to move forward as I am somewhat blocked by memories of pain. Whether that pain was brought on by the flare up of Epstein-Barr Virus, Hashimoto’s, or fibromyalgia, I no longer care. My “habit” if you will, was to stop because of intense pain, but the memory of it is still there. My new habit, or right action, that really aligns with my practice now, is to stay after yoga, ask about that “hard” pose, see how it’s done, and move forward at my own pace.

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So it just takes one thing…just one for me to start my yo-yo mood. The other day, I was doing whatever random things I do on the computer. Mostly making quotes for a few pages I run, and a friend sent me this article in a message called It’s Not Fibromyalgia. I read her message and was surprised that she too suffered…but when I started reading this post, my head went to the place it goes to when people write about their experiences. It kind of goes like this when people talk about how bad it is living with pain…I hear you sister. I understand this. It sucks, but damn this is depressing to read in someone’s voice other than my own. Do I sound like this? Crap. This is messed up. Sigh. More depressing things I have been through. I could be her…she could be me. Wait. Wait a minute. She just said something I need to hear. Someone actually listened to her. Hold on and back up to that part because the rest is the same as my life. Except this part. This part where she finds HOPE.

So I get to the symptoms, you know the part where invisible diseases can’t be seen except for the fact that I have lots of those symptoms…and doctors don’t really know what to do…so I kind of stopped talking to them about what’s going on. And I get to the part where she prayed she had this thing because it actually explains something. Black mold. Wow. Who knew? Well, obviously someone did, but not anyone else most of us have ever come across in our long line of 18 different specialists. So I messaged my one advocate in this fight…Dr. Marion who I have written about. And she says yes. Yes we can do this test.

For those of you who might be new, I gave up on regular doctors after getting diagnosed with fibromyalgia by a man who was a nervous wreck and a top rheumatologist in the area. He said he understood why I wouldn’t want to be on pharmaceuticals given the side effects of the “medicines” and the possibility of a liver compromise with hereditary hemochromatosis (see my tab at the top about that genetic disorder). Not to mention the other possible complications with those “drugs”. I decided to go all-natural using plant based phytotherapy (see my tab Vitalize You at the top). So that brings me to where I am. No doctors listen to my intuition. None. I know for a fact that something deep down has made so many things spin off…and it’s only a matter of time before we find the link. So if this isn’t it…we keep going. But it’s one more thing to cross off. I will let you know what happens.

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Breathe in. Focus on your breath. Breathe out. Whooosh. What am I doing? Oh hi there. Nothing. People are trying to make me cry and stuff…but like that man in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, I am holding it back. Please tell me you clicked on that link. It’s funny. Shhh. Kids movies are funny…plus I don’t see erm adult movies anymore. Back to the point of this post.

I am counting the good days, the good things that happen, and the good people in my life. I am ignoring the bad right now because it’s something I need to do for myself. It is one of my coping mechanisms when I am having a hard time. Somehow, God, the universe and good people know when I am having a hard time. Ok, so I tell God things all the time, but it’s kind of like telling your teacher…maybe even tattling on yourself. You can’t help but think God, are you listening to me? Am I in time-out now? Or maybe He’s like “Aimee, calm down. I am trying to take of the other 1,000,000 people who need me right now. Just chill.” So here I am chilling. Occasionally going God, pick me! Pick me! It’s my turn!!! I am being patient. Well, that’s when He sends in my friends. My support system. People who are there to help.

Knowing that I have a “life sentence” of dealing with the ups and downs of invisible diseases, well, I am not going to lie, I do have “woe is me” days and I hate those days. So I work extra hard to focus on others on those days. I built my fan page around picking up people like me. So imagine my surprise when I woke up one morning, way after all you other nice people have gone to work, and found a note on my wall that I was one of 22 most inspirational pages for my friend Sheila. Well, I was shocked. Look for yourself…I am actually there. Have a peek. Really. It’s still there. I thought maybe it was going to go away like magic, but it’s still there!! 22 Most Inspiring Facebook Pages. Ta-dahhhhhh.

A sense of “you must be doing something right” came over me. Then this contest jumped up in my face here on Best Health Blogs 2014. And I thought why not me too? I got a later start than everyone else who knew about the contest, but it can’t hurt. I technically need a mere 1000 votes to catch up, but it’s for $1,000 and I would definitely put that money to good use as I am paying off dachshund bills, backed up sink, and erm things that were ruined in my attic like my brand-new Christmas tree, but who’s counting? I’m not. Oh and that burning smell in my mini-van that I continue to pray to God will keep working…so we dump more oil in and keep on going (P.S. it’s got some sort of oil leak…but it’s fine). So these things I do not focus on. I don’t. I do that thing that children do when they can’t hear you…I cover my ears and go lalalalalala. Ignore. Can’t deal with you right now.

And guess what? It works for me because I can focus on the good. When I tell you the “bad” and you understand that someone out there gets it, not just kinda gets it, but really and truly could look you in the eye and say “I have been where you are, I might still be there, but it’s getting better day by day.” And you realize that you are not always going to be wherever “there” is. That it might be bad at this moment. It might. But stop, breathe in and out and find the good in your life. It’s there. Trust me sisters and brothers, it’s there. Oh and note to self, God hasn’t stop listening. He hears you. He is making way right now for some amazing things to come into your life. So put on your cape, and start focusing on the good. You can do this.

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